Frederickatlas douglass. Is my pleasure to welcome our guest today. Our actor, moderator and the state which University Professor from the university of maryland. Professor levine has been an influential force in american and African American literature for over 30 years and recently has contributed important work to the burgeoning field of hemispheric and transnational American Literary studies. He is the author of the 2016 book the lives of Frederick Douglass, and after todays production will be signing copies in the archive store. Please welcome Professor Robert levine. [applause] thank you forne the introduction. Thank you to tom for organizing this. It is an honor to be here. My guess is that you would rather hear an actor over an academic, so i will be relatively brief with the introduction. About five minutes. As a lot of you know, Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in 1818, in the Eastern Shore of maryland. For the first 20 years of his life, he was a slave, moving back a